BERKELEY — As Silicon Valley’s gender gap and toxic “bro culture” continue to make headlines, two East Bay teens took it upon themselves to do something about it and created a coding boot camp to help middle school girls become the next programming all-stars.

Head Royce senior Chloe Beittel and Quarry Lane senior Lucinda Quintal came up with the idea for the “Girls Get Coding” camp after Quintal noticed fewer and fewer girls in her computer science classes as they got more advanced, she said. Women only receive 18 percent of computer science bachelor’s degrees, and make up about 26 percent of the computer science workforce, according to a 2018 National Science Foundation study.

“Technology is the future; it’s going to be in everything. And right now since it’s a male-dominated field, we’re looking to increase the diversity because that’s what increases the humanity of all these systems that we’re making,” Quintal said in an interview.

Eleven middle school girls from schools all over the East Bay, but mostly in Berkeley, took part in the seven-week program at the Berkeley Public Library, in which they created their own apps centered around social justice issues using block-based coding — a simpler way of programming that uses blocks of code.

Beittel and Quintal said they wanted to create an environment that didn’t pit the students against each other.

“We made it an all-girls program so that they don’t feel the pressure of, ‘Oh, I need to make sure I’m just as good as the boys,’ ” Quintal said. “They have this freedom to just experiment and there’s no pressure to not make mistakes.”

One group made a game in which a turtle searches for food and dodges plastic litter, one created a simulation of a day in the life of a homeless person and another created a platform in which profiles are created for shelter animals and people can donate to them.

Quintal said the camp was based on the global Technovation program, in which people taking part create apps and enter competitions. Quintal has participated in Technovation, and launched her own version of it with “Girls Get Coding” alongside Beittel, her best friend. The two pitched the idea of the camp to Berkeley Public Library, offering to run it for free, and library staff enthusiastically said yes.

“One of our key initiatives is enabling teens to share their skills and knowledge, and do so in a way that’s collaborative and that fulfills the interests of other community members,” said Library Services Director Elliot Warren said.

Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School student Sierra McCarty couldn’t get enough of the program. Her mother, Marilyn McCarty, said she would run up the library steps in order to get to class, and didn’t want to leave when it was over.

Sierra McCarty said she had an interest in coding before, since it was taught at her school in a co-ed class, but she felt as though her classmates “kept running ahead” and she struggled to keep up. What’s different about the camp, she said, is that the girls worked together to figure out problems.

“I like how you get to make friends, and then you and your friends come together to create the app,” McCarty said.

Quintal and Beittel said they sent a survey to the girls at the end of the course and all responded that both their skills and their confidence had grown as a result of the program.

“It’s been really great to see a diverse group of girls get excited about coding and see what they can do with it,” Beittel said.

The two plan to run the program again next year and expand it to include more students. They are also considering creating a model so that other high school students can run it.

“The stereotypical hacker in a dark room with a hoodie on is an image that we’re trying to change by having young girls teaching young girls,” Quintal said.